Google has found a clever new way to get more people to use its browser so it can keep tabs on them: It’s slowing down YouTube videos in browsers other than Google’s Chrome. An engineer for Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser, pointed out the issue on Twitter.

Mozilla Technical Program Manager Chris Peterson said that YouTube is loading at just one-fifth of the speed it does on Chrome in all non-Chrome browsers because of its architecture.

By the way, this isn’t the first time that Google has tuned one of its web services to make it work better in its own Chrome browser. Services like Google Earth, YouTube TV, Google Meet, and Allo have all blocked the Microsoft Edge browser in the past. At various times, YouTube TV, Google Earth, and Google Meet have been blocked for Firefox users. In one of its more passive-aggressive moves, Google even blocked Google Maps on Windows phones a few years ago, a move that it later reversed.
According to The Verge, Google could easily update YouTube to support these browsers and provide equally quick load times, but it appears that they simply don’t want to.

Don’t give in and use Google Chrome

Users who want reasonable load times but wish to avoid Google Chrome will have to install add-ons in their current browsers that revert YouTube to previous versions – although they’ll have to give up the updated design and its new Dark Mode feature. Safari and Edge users can use a custom script to make it work faster, while Firefox users will have to install an extension. However, that’s a lot of trouble to go to for a platform that is so quick to censor videos with viewpoints that it doesn’t agree with.

YouTube is coming increasingly under fire for banning videos that discuss points of view that clash with their liberal ideals. Natural health videos from The Health Ranger’s video channel and videos criticizing immigration posted by InfoWars are just a few of the many videos the platform has tried to silence recently.

That’s why alternatives like REAL.video are drawing in a lot of new users. Not only is this free-speech video sharing platform known for being inclusive, but it also works on all browsers equally.

Think about it: Why is Google trying so hard to push people into using its own browser? The answer, of course, is data collection, but what’s it doing with all that data on everybody? If Google is so quick to punish people for posting videos on YouTube that they don’t agree with, what does it have in mind for people who use its Chrome browser to open websites about these topics? What will it do with all the information it collects on conservative users’ searches if it’s so willing to silence people posting videos on certain topics?

If you’re not already avoiding Google’s many products like the plague, it’s time to start. Give up Gmail, use Good Gopher for searching, and replace YouTube with REAL.video before it’s too late.